Because transit is like a river.
A program for generating bus route patronage visualisations from origin-destination data.
Note: this program has been going through a rewrite. It is now (v0.3) much faster but a little less flexible than the previous version (v0.2). The old code is still in the repository for now. Its documentation is in readme-old.md.
Get a binary for your platform here.
If you'd like to install from source, first install the Rust toolchain and then run cargo install --git https://github.com/alexjago/fluvial.git
Be sure to get your patronage and route data ready.
By default Fluvial will seek to generate visualisations for every possible route, which takes a while. Use -o ROUTE DIRECTION to generate just one thing at a time for initial testing.
This tool was developed with and is intended for data from TransLink SEQ.
That data is released here: https://data.qld.gov.au/dataset/go-card-transaction-data
Download and put it somewhere accessible.
TransLink SEQ's GTFS data can be found here:
https://data.qld.gov.au/dataset/general-transit-feed-specification-gtfs-seq
Caveat: the patronage data has historically been up to a year behind whereas the GTFS data is always current. Luckily routes don't change often.
Try transitfeeds.com if you need GTFS for a specific time (for example, if a route is seasonal).